Immediately following the success of the third installment in the Terminator series the Halcyon Company announced their plans to move forward with the fourth movie, with or without their star Terminator. It’s now been a few years and Halcyon is ready to make good on their words. Unfortunately, due to his scheduling conflict with the whole ‘being a governor’ thing Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t be joining the cast for this next film.

Halcyon Company founders, Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson, purchased the rights to the $1 billion franchise for an undisclosed amount several years ago and are looking to take full advantage of their ownership. In light of losing the original Terminator the rumor mill says the new storyline will add an additional three Terminator films to fans’ shelves. These new films are to be considered a second trilogy and will focus on the building war between man and machine.

“With T3, we included many incidental details and plot points that, along with the ain [sic?] narrative, set the stage for an entirely new set of inter-related stories covering the future adventures of John Connor and the Terminators,” producer Moritz Borman said. “This new Terminator trilogy will build upon the already huge worldwide Terminator fan base, which was both revitalized and expanded with the global success of T3.”

Preproduction on Terminator 4 is set to begin as soon as possible. Expect to see it in theaters as soon as summer 2009.

As a big fan of the series I’m excited for the chance to get more of the story, but I am of course disappointed at the lack of the main man. There’s always the chance that Arnold could show up for some sort of a cameo though as the governor’s spokesperson says, “no law says he couldn’t” take part in the movies.

This is also quite timely as earlier this week I was talking with friends about how we wanted to see the future war between mankind and SkyNet and we all thought that’s where the third movie was going to go. Obviously it didn’t, but this just might give us our chance to finally see more than a few minutes of those battles.

If you can’t wait until summer 2009 for more Terminator action, check out the details on the Terminator TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This series might get picked up by Fox for fall 2007. It’d be a good idea to get your fill of Sarah Connor now as she definitely won’t be in the future films.